https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Hpe-qDqMX7E
So how did you manage that combination of scripting and spontaneity? It seems like a very difficult thing to pull off, especially, I presume, that before you engaged in the Duck Dynasty series, you guys weren’t actors and you didn’t have a lot of experience while certainly producing like a half-scripted family sitcom. So how did you manage to keep it funny and spontaneous at the same time that you managed to impose some sort of narrative structure on it? And who was responsible for that? How did you do that? It was just talent from God. Humility. Is that the right order? You know, I mean, for me, it was about I’d watch shows. And so what I thought was funny, and like Seinfeld, you know, I watched shows, I was like, oh, it’s really funny how they did that. And so I tried to just do that, remain in myself. I kind of had to stay in one spot. I talked to a lady at A&E who was just brilliant, and Lily, and she wasn’t even from America, which blew me away that she’s from Argentina, came here, was working with American television, to not even be able to grow up here, but to figure out the nuances of people from the South and how that’s funny that would go across America really just blew me away. But she always said like, you’re the boss, which I am, so you have to be the boss. And so I couldn’t stray very, very far from that, because that’s what makes it funny, because people get in trouble. And I would be like, oh, I want to goof off. And she’d be like, you have to be the boss. And so I would come in there. So really, there was that dynamic that really makes comedy, kind of like when you’re in school and someone says something that you’re not supposed to laugh at or church, and it’s so funny, you can’t help but laugh. And so it was kind of that idea. And so once we kind of got that dynamic, which was a real dynamic, I mean, I was the CEO of the company, but I’m not the oldest. And so it wasn’t my father. So there were some kind of strange things there, the dynamics of the company, because it was like, dad’s company, but I was the boss. And that’s what they walked in with. It’s like, what do we got here? Okay, Willie’s running it, but I’m the third from the top. And as far as siblings, dad’s not in charge. Dad’s kind of doing his own thing. And so once we got the dynamics, and then we just kind of plugged it in and said, y’all go, what would happen? And we would talk about frustrations where the guys would want to fart around or they always want to go hunting. They didn’t want to be up there actually making the duck calls, which was a common theme. And then we just kind of went with that and just took off with it and then mixed in with family life or whatever. So that’s kind of how I guess we did it. 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In principle, this camera crew is following these narrative wells around all the time. And a fair bit of it’s scripted, but a fair bit of it is spontaneous, and it’s often extremely witty. I also know that Guy Ritchie, the British film actor or director, who’s made a number of brilliant, absolutely brilliant films. What he does is he, I’ve talked to him about this, he sets up the stage and the set, and he primes the actors, and they know the story, and then they improvise the dialogue. And that’s so cool, because one of the things that really makes Ritchie’s movies remarkable is the brilliance and harshness of the dialogue. And he gets his actors to play along, and he really likes to work with the actors that can do that. And then the other thing that it reminds me of is what children do when they pretend. So children start to pretend play when they’re about three years old. That’s when they start playing with other children in a real manner. And the way they’ll do that is they’ll take a scenario that’s somewhat typical, like a household structure, because children often play house, and they’ll assign roles, and they’ll basically lay out a script idea that everybody has to agree on, and then they improvise. And that’s actually what the pretend play is. And if the kids, if it’s going well, and the kids are friends, they can get right into it, and they can do that for hours. And what they’re doing is simulating reality and experimenting with roles, and also trying to be funny and amuse each other. And so I wonder, did you have, I don’t know if the pretense, the child pretense ideas ever occurred to you before, did you ever have any sense that you said what you were doing was fun and it stayed playful? Did you ever have any sense that you had returned to the sorts of things that children do when they’re very young? I love that analogy, because I do think that it sounds exactly like really what we did, but I never thought of it that way. But yeah. It really is true. And I think with this show, you had some really strong personalities. And so you had some, probably if you were kids, you’d be like, you’re the bad guy, and then you’re the good guy, and you’re the horse, or whatever it would be. So with this one, you had some just great, really strong defining characters. So you had my father, who was like… The patriarch. But really strong, but not just, he’s not goofy dad. This guy’s really strong and really opinionated. And then his brother, my Uncle Si… I don’t need a knife. I don’t need a sense of direction. I don’t even need clothes. Funny and just one of the most unusual guys I’ve ever seen. As far as the quickness he has, and how he tells stories is just epic. And so you had him that you just never know. You could almost play off him. He could kind of just do whatever he did. So it was like, he would do that, dad would do that. And then I would go like, oh, this is perfect. I’m just going to come off this. If dad’s really overplaying it, I’d be like, dad, that’s… We can’t do… So I could just kind of play off of where they went, or Uncle Si. But Uncle Si, I would feed him a line, especially with pop culture, that wouldn’t make sense that he would know that. And he was so brilliant. He could just take what he would hear, and then he would throw it in there like he thought of it. He would say, I remember going to Beyonce’s song, I said, Si, if you love it, you better put a ring on it. And so I would be talking to him, like, hey, Jack, if you love it, you better put a ring on it. And he would just come in there, and then the editing would stop. It’s like, did he just say that? And it was so brilliant. And then if he screwed it up, it was even funnier. One time I gave him a song called, This Is How We Do It by Montel Williams. So then Si goes, hey, this is the way that we do it, which was totally incorrect, but it was so funny. Because then the audience was like, he tried to do it, but he didn’t do it. But we really thought he just came up with that or whatever. I think I was talking to Bill Clinton one time. And Bill Clinton pulls me in, and I understood why these guys can become president. Because he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he said, I love Duck Dynasty. And for whatever reason, I said, you don’t watch Duck Dynasty. I don’t know why I took that aggressive, like opposite approach to it. And he looks at me and he goes, you want to know why that show worked? And I was like, yeah, I would love to know why Bill Clinton thought this show worked. And the answer he gave was not just the best political answer ever, because he covered every deal. He said, because it was real. And he’s looking at me, he said, it’s real. And I was thinking to myself, and I went, but if it wasn’t real, we thought it was real. And so I was like, there you go. So he was like, that’s why we bought into it. And if it wasn’t, you fooled us. We got it. Well, also, I think that as we were doing this and playing these roles, we were also having to play ourselves. So we were like, oh, I have to walk around as Corey. So I have to, it has to represent who I am. So that first season, there was a lot of kind of fighting through, okay, what pieces of this is storytelling and is, is pushing the story along, and what pieces of it are us and who we are. And so I do think that was a fine line to try to find. And, you know, early seasons, I remember one specific scene, there was a, there’s a scene where Willie and the guys were supposed to come to the kids school. Instead of doing that, they skipped out and went golfing. And so they come in for that evening. And we’re with Phil and K, Willie’s parents and my sister-in-law and I are sitting there. And, and in the scene, the plan was for us to just kind of let our guys have it, you know, because they had skipped out on what they were supposed to do. They’re coming in. And it just, we couldn’t do it because we’re like, we would never let our husbands have it in front of their parents. Like we just wouldn’t do that. And they wouldn’t do that to us. Like they wouldn’t, you know, but they came in in front of our parents. They wouldn’t just lay into us, you know? And so, you know, the, as, as it plays out, the directors are like, come on, just let them have it. Aren’t you mad that they, you know, skipped out? And, and I was just like, we just, we wouldn’t have this conversation right here. We can’t do this. You know, this is, this is who I am and I can’t do it. And so we, we ended up just kind of like scruffing that scene and we, they said, well, what would you do? Well, they caught y’all with some dirty, y’all just gave us some dirty looks. Yeah, we gave some dirty looks. Yeah. They said, what? They edited a bunch of dirty looks. So they were like, what would you do? And I said, well, we’d had this conversation that night in our own home, you know? And so we come that night, that evening, and we filmed a whole nother scene in our kitchen where Willie walks in and I kind of tell him, a little bit what I thought about it. And there was a lot of discussion back and forth with the producers, you know, as we were making it, because you’ve got to be open, you know, you can’t just say this is it. So you’ve got to be open. Because even back to the beginning of the show, where Corey said, she said, I think your family should do a reality TV show. And I was like, we’re just normal people. Like I didn’t see it at all. And Corey’s like, Willie, y’all aren’t normal. Like the yard. Because I appreciate that because she married into this family, it was like, y’all aren’t normal. So I was like, so you got to have an open ear to going, okay, other people can see this differently than what you can see yourself. And so you had to be open to producers. But I think where the dynamic got a little strange was that their idea of family or their idea of what family is, was really different than ours. And so that’s, I think sometimes they have more of that stereotypical, the dad’s a goofball. He’s just, you know, all he wants to do is watch football or drink a beer. You know, and mom’s the smartest one. Kids are like on their phones, like, we hate this, you know. And so we broke that because of, and we wanted to, we were like, we’re not all families are like that. You know, there’s respect and there’s, you know, like my children would not roll their eyes at me and say, whatever, dad, you know, we hate this. And, you know, so, and dad has a brain and he can think outside of, you know, those things are. So sometimes there was that you had to be open, I think, to listen and be like, oh, that’s really funny, but also not just go down the path that I think a lot of sitcoms, I mean, honestly, so many of them are just the same, you know. And so, I think that’s the mold that we really broke out of because before that reality TV was, it was all about the fight. It was all about like the train wreck. What can you, like, the big scenes are the ones where the tables are flipped and everyone’s fighting and everyone’s arguing where for us, the big scenes where the family is around the table. And there’s that, like Willie mentioned, we mentioned twice, I think, respect, you know, that respect for one another and for the kids and their parents and kids and their grandkids. And there was another scene where Phil, who was the granddad, you know, was having the grandkids clean a football field, a clear field, and they just expected that the kids would be arguing, complaining, upset about it, you know, we didn’t want to do it. But instead, our kids were, of course, you know, their pet ball asked them to clean a field, they’ll clean a field. And so it was just this, like, this dynamic that we had to kind of work through early seasons to say like, Oh, no, that’s, that’s just not who we are and not what we do. So there was a part of it that was playful, but then a part of it that was also us kind of saying, No, this is who we are. This is what our family’s about. And it’s going to look different than maybe what you expected or what’s out there on television right now. you